3GQ HEALTH. 



the newness of those first senses which opened upon the morning of 

 time ? And if delight is the bed of genius, what must have been 

 the brightness of the insights that went penetrating forth from the 

 eyes of the children of happiness in the beginning? The word hap- 

 piness, in its human propriety, contains it all. Such races would 

 happen on the needful laws of the world, and its harmonies with 

 their frames, and when the first stings of sin tore them with their 

 first physical pangs, they would aim at cunning evasions of con- 

 sequences by arts and herbs with which they had been familiar 

 under other auspices. The speed of their reasons would be like reve- 

 lations compared to the slowness of ours. And thus if we choose 

 to call the mythologies, revelations, we must also call medicine by 

 the same name, so far as it has come down from the original stem. 

 The thought of harmony corroborates this view. For primeval man 

 was in harmony with his circumstances, and his mind had a fair 

 start : he had his own native version of physiologies, botanies and 

 the rest, though unlike ours; and when he swerved to our tree of 

 knowledge, his child-genius, like all natural things, could only desert 

 him by degrees. Doubtless it hovered over him, until it created for 

 him the heads of that observation which is still traditive with man. 

 There is another version of this, but it is hardly worth our notice : 

 criticism, as the art of picking things to pieces, is its parent. For 

 they say that man was at first a savage (or according to learned Ves- 

 tiges, an ape), who by dint of a toilette of some thousands of years 

 before the mirror of philosophy, has " titivated" himself into civiliza- 

 tion. This contradicts experience. The savages* are not infantile 

 but senile races, with no loins left; they tend not to pro-creation, 

 but extinction. They have no power of imitating the models of 

 their betters, but where the white man comes they die out. If the 

 Creator had planted the earth with such, he would have been like a 

 Colonial Secretary peopling a new continent with scum. Pretty 

 babes these to have appeared so soon after the morning stars con- 

 gratulatively sung together and the sons of God shouted for joy ! 



* We do not reckon the negro races as savages ; they are evidently still infan- 

 tine, capable of propagation and education: nay, capable of passive conquest, by 

 the very destinies which have enslaved them, and which are insuring to their 

 posterity many spacious kingdoms on the lace of the earth. 



